You probably don’t know who Howard Paine was, but you’ve seen his graphic artistry hundreds, probably thousands of times.
You’ve seen it if you’ve ever licked a postage stamp — back in the days when they had to be licked — mailed a letter, or thumbed the pages of National Geographic magazine. For more than 30 years, Paine was a stamp design coordinator of the Postal Service. For more than 30 years, he also was a graphic artist at the National Geographic Society, retiring as art director.
At the Postal Service, Paine helped bring out the 29-cent Elvis Presley stamp in 1993. After 21 years, it remains the all-time leader in commemorative stamps, with 500 million sold. Paine also helped create the Ronald Reagan stamp as well as stamps commemorating the planets, gospel singers, movie stars and comedians. He had a role in the design of 400 stamps in all, according to Terry McCaffrey, the retired manager of stamp development at the Postal Service.
At National Geographic, it took more than 20 years but, beginning in 1959, Paine changed the basic cover design of the magazine. Ever so gradually, he removed a leaf here and a leaf there from the borders of clustered oak and laurel leaves that had graced the magazine’s monthly covers since 1910.
“We went ahead with glacial speed,” Paine told historian Eugene Scheel in a 2010 Washington Post interview. “We didn’t want members writing in with, ‘Where are my oak leaves?’” On Paine’s watch, color photography became the basic ingredient of National Geographic covers.
On Sept. 13, at the age of 85, Paine died at a health care center in Front Royal, Virginia. The cause was Alzheimer’s disease, said a daughter, Michelle Pellatt.
As a neophyte staffer at National Geographic in the late 1950s, Paine got started on redesigning the cover when Melville Bell Grosvenor, president of the National Geographic Society and editor of its magazine, declared at a staff meeting that he’d like to see a picture there.
Gingerly, Paine spoke up. “Well, we’ll have to reduce the width of the border and take out the word ‘Magazine’ from the title,” he recalled to Scheel. “Everybody, to my surprise, agreed.”
Of the later Geographic covers, Paine would say, “The face is just magic. … I favored a big head, whether it was a pretty girl or a tribal chieftain — even the portrait of an animal. A portrait is a compelling logo.”
At the Postal Service, where he became a stamp design coordinator in 1981 while still working for National Geographic, Paine once declared that he wanted to “do some adventurous things” with stamps. He was the idea man and the persuasive force behind a series of cloudscape stamps that were issued by a skeptical Postal Service.
Word of the series reached the nation’s corps of radio and television weather forecasters. They talked it up in their broadcasts, and the series sold surprisingly well, said McCaffrey, the retired postal official.
Howard Erwin Paine was born May 1, 1929, in Springfield, Massachusetts, and he began stamp collecting in childhood. He was a 1950 philosophy graduate of American International College in Springfield.
He had no formal design training, but he edited his high school and college yearbooks. He worked in a family electrical business until 1957 and had a short-lived job writing and designing ads for a bank and advertising firm. He also read Advertising Age and other periodicals to keep atop trends in design.
Paine then joined the staff at National Geographic after having answered a newspaper advertisement seeking an editor and designer of books about “science, geography and the world around it,” as he recalled to Scheel. He said he did not get the job based on his portfolio but because of a made-up travel book he called “Walking the Streets of Paris,” with sketches of a river, houses and trees.
His first week or so on the job was spent in a hospital, recovering from appendicitis and designing a National Geographic book on dogs, which was well received by senior editors.
At National Geographic, Paine also designed Explorers Hall, the first floor of the society’s headquarters at 17th and M Streets NW in Washington. He retired from National Geographic in 1990. He was with the Postal Service from 1981 to 2012.
Paine’s marriage to Mary Enos Paine ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife since 1978, Jane D’Alelio of Delaplane, Virginia; three children from his first marriage — George Paine of Leesburg, Virginia, and Ralph Paine and Robert Paine, both of Vienna, Virginia; three children from his second marriage — Adam Paine of Santa Margarita, California, Brent Paine of San Luis Obispo, California, and Michelle Pellatt of Stevens City, Virginia; and six grandsons. A son from his first marriage, Christopher Paine, died in 1975.
Paine lived in the Fauquier County (Virginia) community of Delaplane, where, according to his family, he enjoyed the whistles of passing trains and the ripple of the creek near his house.
At the Postal Service, he was best known for his contributions to the Elvis stamp. He supervised several artists in arriving at the final design, which was intended as the first in a series of commemorative stamps honoring American music and musicians. Of the 500 million Elvis stamps sold, $26 million worth of the stamps have not been used and are believed to be in the hands of collectors.
Paine was known for his bow ties and a soft-spoken manner. At staff meetings, he tended to be silent and sometimes appeared to be doodling, former Postal Service staffer McCaffrey said. Then he would stand up, walk over to whoever was leading the meeting, and hand him a napkin or scrap of paper with a stamp design drawn on it. Frequently it was just what was needed.